Increasingly, servers and other computing devices receive communications and establish connections with a wide variety of telecommunication devices and computer systems to transmit voice calls, emails, text and instant messages, and application and user data. Such communications and connections typically involve the transmission of both signaling and payload messages. Signaling messages, such as Radio Resource Control (RRC) reconfiguration of radio bearers or General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Packet Data Protocol (PDP) context establishments, are often used in the control plane to establish the connections or to indicate the transmission of data in the user plane (payload). Because signaling messages are not typically used to transmit the data payloads, they are often relatively small and, individually, do not impose a large demand on the processing resources of the receiving device. With the increasing volume of signaling messages observed from the increasing use of smartphone applications, however, there is a risk of such signaling messages overwhelming the devices receiving and processing them.
Payload messages can be quite large and thus impose a significant demand on processing resources. To enable orderly processing of these payload messages, receiving devices often use one of a number of quality-of-service algorithms that limit the number of payload messages processed, order those messages, or offload processing of some of the payload messages to another device.